I remember working on VAX servers running VMS in the late '90s. As a new guy they had to send us half way across the country to a place that could train us. On my desk I had a VAX Terminal, and an old 386 computer running Windows 3.11 that I usually played solitare on.

I was hired as a Computer Programmer, and worked with Computer Operators who - until shortly before I got there - were also called "Tape Monkeys" because they would swap the big reel to reel tapes on and off the machines as needed.

Before we prematurely bury these languages, let us remember "Fortran" is an acronym for Formula Translation and was correctly presented as FORTRAN not Fortran. "Cobol" is an acronym for Common Business Oriented Language and presented as COBOL not Cobol. Also note that both languages, while their prime has passed, are still in production quietly serving the needs of the Business.

Today's "hip" languages may never enjoy the life span FORTRAN and COBOL provided as the workhorse languages of so many IT Shops. This longevity contributed to applications stability, as developers were not always pressing to standardize on what seems to be the "development tool of the quarter" mentality.

Good question - if I had the answers I should probably keep them to myself and start an IT career consultancy. :)

A couple of things seem somewhat likely. There will probably be more nomenclature changes (like MIS morphing into IT or the relatively recent popularity of sys admin titles versus things like system operator/engineer/etc) that are effectively describing the same role, just X years later.

On the development/programming side of things, I'm sure new languages/frameworks will emerge that replace current skills or at least diminish current demand for them.

This article made me sad. So many things that were important and exciting have been "dead" for a very long time: an ST-220 freeing me from floppies, sending nonstandard characters to a Model 33 teletype to make words from the holes in the paper tape, every Borland product, playing with ANSI.sys escape sequences to make color DOS prompts, math coprocessors, assembly language, marvelling at the flashing lights on the CPU forever out of reach on the other side of the card-deck submission station, the awesome 386, making clever batch files to do "impossible" stuff, plastering overstruck-character graphics on strips of 132-wide pin-fed printer output on my dorm-room wall to make a huge black-and white billboard-size photograph, loading drivers into himem, languages that were just straight programming without all this ugly OOP crap...

I remember marveling at the "paint" program in Windows v1.0 when it repeatedly plotted a circle in real time as I dragged the mouse. I thought, "can you IMAGINE how many sine and cosine functions it evaluates to do that?"

I remember people actually laughing when I joked that the line printers might get the tape drives and the card punch to join the "symbiont liberation army." Worker programs unite!

Now there's no more line printers, tape drives, card punches, symbionts, or communism.

When I installed DesqView and swapped entire sessions (including the character-based screens) back and forth from EMS, I thought my PC was like a magic wonderland. And I remember being SOO excited when I found out I could connect mom's Compaq CGA output, not just to her amber monitor, but to an RF modulator and play Lunar Lander in COLOR!

Now they're all dead. I used to be proud to say I was a "hacker". Now it means "Russian mafia criminal."

Oh well.

Even though all this new technology is orders of magnitude cooler (I guess), none of it is exciting here in The Future. Even if you limit it to just keyboards, it's, like, okay, this week's miracle is a keyboard you can roll up and put in a paper-towel tube. But who wants to?

Last week's miracle was a tiny box that laser-projects an image of a keyboard and you can type with it because it watches your fingers tap the surface of your desk. But why do that when real keyboard keys are so much softer?

I thought it was the coolest thing when Asimov had a character in Second Foundation type by dictating to his typewriter. Now it's just another feature of the O/S. Next week's keyboard miracle will be...

Who really cares? Getting excited about stuff now is like the Jetsons getting excited about their huge flat-screen color TV or the "hard A.I." in their robot maid.

The last time I felt the way I used to about technology was years ago. I read that 14 percent of 13 year-old girls sent completely-naked pictures of themselves to boys in their class, to let them know they liked them(!) I was completely floored. My soul melted. That was the sexiest thing I ever heard of in my life, and there wasn't anything I would't do to be a 13 year-old girl again.

But you CAN'T go back to when things were exciting. Not ever.

Yeah, a lot was gained, but a lot more was lost: the newness and magic and wonderfulness of it all.

I was hired as a Computer Programmer with Control Data in 1978. I programmed a variant of PL/1 as well as assembly and helped write a relational database program. Then I used a 4GL (how many remember that?). Then I worked for Caterpillar designing relational database tables using an ER system (Entity Relationship). I learned SGML (Standard Graphical Markup Language) to write my documentation. That proved helpful when I started developing web pages.

Along the way, I also learned UG II (version 6), Windows 1.0 (!!!), Pro/ENGINEER, and a couple PDM systems.

Times change, but programming languages are still based upon if then, declaration statements, and loops.

I must be older than dirt. I actually wrote a progam in binary code on a CDC machine. Also, occasionally wired an IBM card sorter. Then Fortran, Cobol, and RPG. The technology was much simpler then. It is like comparing a Ford Model A to today's cars. Both can get you from point A to point B but that is about the only similarity.

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